Menken, Adah Isaacs

Menken, Adah Isaacs (1835–68),born near New Orleans, began her dramatic career in that city (1857) and married a Cincinnati merchant, Alexander Isaac Menken. Her stage career took her to New York (1859), where she became a friend of Whitman, O'Brien, and others at the bohemian rendezvous Pfaff's Cellar. In 1861 she first played her famous title role in Byron's Mazeppa, noted for the scene in which, semi‐nude, she was strapped to the back of a wild horse. Her acting in this and other parts made her a favorite, in San Francisco and Virginia City, of the literary group which included Clemens, Harte, and Artemus Ward, and in London of Dickens, Reade, Swinburne, Rossetti, and Burne‐Jones, as well as in Paris, where her admirers included Gautier and Dumas père. She was meanwhile married three times after leaving Menken, once bigamously to the prizefighter Heenan, and once to Robert Henry Newell. Her adventures became so fabulous that she once declared, “I never lived with Houston; it was General Jackson and Methuselah, and other big men.” Her poetry, like her life and acting, was rich, garish, and romantic. The rhythms, generally ascribed to the influence of Whitman, seemed to have sprung from the writings of the Hebrew prophets, and the subjects were always passionately autobiographical. Her poems were collected as Infelicia (1868).